


The End Of Something

by tjstar



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Apocalypse averted, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, Klaus Hargreeves-centric, M/M, No Incest, Past Drug Addiction, Post-Canon, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Sibling Bonding, Sober Klaus Hargreeves, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-23 11:27:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20339359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjstar/pseuds/tjstar
Summary: 43 kids were born on the first day of October 1989, but only 7 of them survived. Klaus never told his siblings about thedead ones.





	The End Of Something

Sobriety is loud. 

Unbearably, ridiculously loud. Louder than a choir in the church; louder than the funeral bells. A spooky celebration, a party thrown inside of Klaus’ skull; bang, bang, banging there along with his ragged heartbeat. 

Deafening, hurting. 

It’s rather humiliating since they’re just a team of dysfunctional ex-superheroes who could avert the Apocalypse in their own twisted way. Who still couldn’t avert Ben’s death. 

It’s been a while since they poorly fixed Vanya. It’s been a while since Klaus started wearing these flamboyant hand-made cardigans, because knitting turned out to be a nice hobby; he ties his hair into a knot which makes him look like a hippie, or well, maybe he shouldn’t be listening to Diego’s comments. 

“Klaus!”

It takes a little cardiac arrest to realize that this voice doesn’t belong to a ghost.

“Who do you want me to manifest this time?” 

The sight of Diego in front of Klaus is disturbing. As if he’s caught him off guard on getting high. 

“No one,” Diego falters. “Just checking.”

Klaus leans back onto the pillows.

“Could’ve knocked first. Privacy, all that jazz. What if I’m like, busy-busy?” 

“You’re the one who’s never heard of privacy, don’t forget about it,” Diego rolls his eyes. 

“Well, times are changing, mi hermano._ I am _ changing, see? For the sake of my family, of course.” 

Diego obviously wants to strike him down with a witty answer, but he’s lost this battle already, because come on, how could you _ not, _ getting into an argument with Klaus. Klaus just doesn’t give him a chance to excuse himself, turning to the wall.

Diego slams the door shut. Well, better for him.

Klaus’ bedroom keeps dark secrets. He started to write all across the walls when he barely turned six, and the world kept throwing blows all over his young body, young mind. He wasn’t craving to get his powers — he’s gifted with a curse. With a bunch of curses. And his empathy is definitely one of them. Klaus reads the quotes scribbled across the old plastering like the notes in the margins, he never let their Mom remove or overlap any of them with paint. Sometimes it’s his words, sometimes they come out of the mouths of the dead.

“Is it still that bad?”

Klaus chokes on panic and jumps up on the bed. 

“Jesus! Ben,” he exhales, wrapping his hands around his stomach. “What’s wrong with you, guys?!” 

If someone had given him an answer, he would’ve only laughed like a madman. 

But Ben only says,

“You know.” 

Ben is the one who unwillingly gets soaked up in the splatters of Klaus’ empathy. A burst, a tidal wave, like a sudden return of his long-forgotten puberty — _ oh hi, Five _ — and it sucks. It’s worse than the withdrawal, to be honest. Klaus closes his eyes with a groan. There’s not much help your chaotically incorporeal brother can provide, right? Right.

“You know,” Ben repeats when Klaus zones out again. “You don’t have to do this alone.” 

“Alone?” Klaus switches his mode. “I’m not _ alone, _silly,” it sounds really funny in this occasion. “I’ve got these dead cheerleaders dancing behind my back and waiting for me to get screwed. Look!” he waves his arm. “Bonjour, Mr. French baker with his eyes gouged out!”

The ghost with a bloody mask on his face flinches like a hologram. Klaus scoffs.

Loneliness is probably overrated just like everything. No matter what he says, no matter what he does — there are the ghosts tied with invisible ropes to each of his siblings. Klaus was the one to spot plenty of nannies with twisted necks and broken backs chasing Vanya, but_ I heard a rumor that you didn’t see them. _ He pretended then, like a good brother, he didn’t want to ruin Allison’s self-confidence. But then the Horror inside of Ben went insane, and a deceased Ben didn’t want to “find his peace in the light”, and then again — _ I heard a rumor that you stopped lying about being able to see Ben. _ Because Reginald wanted them to keep faking the truth. Allison was just a talented kid, after all. A bit selfish, but who wasn’t? 

Klaus’ rebellion surfaced once again when he couldn’t participate in that show anymore, when he was wiping the blood leaking out of his nose after his personal training in the mausoleum with a whisper tickling his ears: _ I heard a rumor that you don’t remember anything, _ and _ I heard a rumor that you are not afraid of the dead. _ Allison still couldn’t rumor him into all of these or into getting clean, couldn’t make him forget about the silhouettes floating above the cemetery. It got just worse when Diego left The Academy. 

Klaus followed him soon after.

And so did Ben. Of course. 

These flashbacks have gotten more vivid after getting sober.

“Don’t think about it.” 

Ben is swaddled in a blue glowing, a bit tangible as Klaus pokes him with his bare toe.

“You know,” Klaus swallows hard. “The others.” 

“I know.”

Ben might be stuck in the middle of nowhere, but it hasn’t devoured his most specific traits. Klaus lets out an uneven breath.

“I can’t handle it. They’re… So reckless.” 

Allison stopped trying to put him into a blissful numbness like she did with Vanya, but Klaus was about to pray for her to succeed with him for once. 

43 kids were born on the first day of October 1989, but only 7 of them survived. Klaus never told his siblings about _ the dead ones. _About how they haunt him in his nightmares, flaunting their abilities and letting out blood-curdling yelps when he least expects it. He never turns off Christmas lights adorning his room to give him an illusion of safety, but his current condition doesn’t let him clear his head completely. There is a dust-covered hookah hiding under the table, it can still bring to life all the psychedelic posters like the elements of decor.

Ben asks,

“How long?”

“Since I stopped using,” Klaus scratches the back of his head. “Worst of all, Dave hasn’t appeared yet.” 

He looks at the wallpapers again, at the messy doodles; he tried to keep track on the ghosts visiting his bedroom every night when he was a kid, but the count broke on the 124th phantom; _ h.e.l.p, _ he reads. Hello-Goodbye. This memorial makes him all jittery and sick, with one of his unfinished suicide notes — that line was not what it was meant to be, but his siblings thought so anyway when they found his almost-a-corpse after his first OD. 

Klaus keeps scraping his forearms, leaving permanent red lines on his skin. Most stylish. Most tortured, most (un)rumored and hopeless. 

“I don’t know what to do with them anymore,” Klaus says. “This is the shittiest season of the show with the title _ My Life.” _

Ben doesn’t call him a colossal wimp this time.

“Being dead is not easy either.”

And Klaus informs him,

“I’m gonna relapse.” 

***

Leaving his room is a mistake. 

Luther is like a concrete slab with his giant palm like a lead on Klaus’ shoulder, squeezing it, making Klaus let out a tiny shriek. 

“Careful, man. Ever heard of Chinese porcelain? Fragile thingy, huh.”

“Stop it,” Luther fumes over nothing since his Moon Mission has been taken away. “We need to talk,” he pauses. “It’s important.” 

Klaus sways.

“Aren’t we talking, like, right now?”

His words are just a little slurred due to an onslaught of dizziness, but he’s just Klaus, after all. The one who never stays sober for more than fifteen minutes. 

“You’re never paying attention on the shit happening around you.” 

Luther wants to get a reaction, and Klaus gives him a sincere smile. Luther hates his _ unprofessionalism, _ so he needs to escape from the conversation until the things would escalate to a pile of horrible insults. 

But Luther has learned a violent trick. 

“This is why Ben died.”

Klaus sees red for a second, throwing Luther’s hand off his shoulder with something that might be called a crackhead strength* and takes a deep breath.

“Pardonne moi, big bro? You really think he died because of _ me? _ I was the damn lookout while he was dying _ on you guys, _ remember? And if you’d taken your head out of your hairy ass for once, well, theoretically, Ben would’ve been still alive!”

Klaus’ voice wavers on the edge; he’s really about to start a fist fight if Luther won’t shut up. 

“Crap, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” Luther quickly takes a step back. “Dad was just so mad with you being so high that night and everything.”

“I wasn’t high.”

Klaus spits it out, and Luther keeps blinking at him, opening his mouth silently. He’s probably so pissed because Allison left to meet her daughter and her not-so-ex husband in LA.

“Klaus, listen, I’m—”

“You shoved me against the wall when I just wanted to help you, and where did it get us? Thank your lucky stars Ben was there to get us through,” Klaus deadpans. “Go spill your hormones onto someone else.” 

He cuts the rest of the conversation with the wave of his GOODBYE hand.

***

Ben threw out a pills-filled plush unicorn the last time Klaus made him corporeal by accident. But Klaus got this whole mansion to pawn which is not an option anymore, or _ wait. _

“Wait,” Ben half begs half orders. 

Klaus stands still with a gold-plated dish in his hands. He leans to the cupboard, wishing he could dive into a drug-induced amnesia already. His horrendous dreams splash all over his dull reality, and in fact, his powers never done any good things for him. Like, at all. Even his own brother punched him in the face. 

“Don’t do this, Klaus.”

He loses control of his powers every so often, and that plays the right card for Ben; he can jostle Klaus aside, and the dish falls out of his hands onto the parquet. He’s been clean for long enough for Ben to take over his body. _ Stay sober _ is the only inspirational speech Ben can produce at the moment, but who needs words if Ben can actually lock Klaus up back in his room.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re serious!” Klaus whines. 

An outburst of rage leaves him drained and nauseous all of the sudden, the voices fill his ears again. 

“Try to sleep it off,” Ben freezes next to the door like a guardian. “Please,” he adds.

“What exactly do you want me to sleep off? My life? My abilities?” Klaus chuckles and falls down onto the mattress. It’s gotten real firm over the years. 

Ben doesn’t respond.

***

He’s somehow managed to drift off; it now feels more like a faint though. Ben is not in his bedroom anymore, and Klaus is thirsty to the point he can barely speak. He cracks the door open, heading to the kitchen to get a shot of... water, just water, he promises to himself. It doesn’t help him satisfy his hunger for something stronger, and Reginald’s not-so-mini bar is like a light at the end of the tunnel, so Klaus deliberates slipping into his old habits’ welcoming embrace. 

He doesn’t make it towards the shelves with alcohol, because the mayhem his powers bring covers the surface, crashing the living room like a hurricane. 

Klaus whips around just to see hazy figures filling up the space.

“What?”

He even forgets he can make all the ghosts corporeal now and he is extremely bad at his unpredictable maneuvers. He’s reminded of it with a well-delivered punch that clips him square in the jaw.

_ Oh here we go, _ Klaus thinks before his consciousness flickers out like a light. 

***

He wakes up to a bone-chilling cold. Not even the soul he puts into every threat of the things he knits can warm him up. He can’t stop shivering as he opens his eyes and surfs the wave of terror when he recognizes the place he’s been thrown in.

“No, no, no, no,” Klaus shrinks into himself and slaps himself across his cheeks not to pass out once again. “Ben!” he hollers until his lungs give up. “Ben!”

But Ben’s not here, the others are. 

“You shouldn’t be living this life,” they screech.

_ Indeed._

Not all of them look like kids, these spirits don’t follow the ghost logic. Some of them are teenagers, there are the adults among the bleeding infants as if they had to time-travel to grow up. Murder machines or Klaus’ potential siblings, asking not for help but for revenge. They’re getting him into a circle of their ephemeral bodies, pointing their fingers at him, cussing in foreign languages; Klaus doesn’t understand all the words, he clamps his palms over his ears. This torment is much worse than all the attacks he’s survived back in Vietnam. 

Back in Vietnam.

Dave.

“Dave, Ben, anybody!” Klaus squeezes his eyes shut as the muttering around him grows louder. “Let me out! Let me out!” 

He’s a scared thirteen-year-old again, locked in the crypt to defeat his fears. There’s the tombstone with a statue of a sleeping girl on top of it; this one frightens him the most. Klaus is almost envious of his teenage self now, because he couldn’t make the ghosts _solid_ back then,so they could only cripple him mentally.

Now, they can hurt him physically.

So when Klaus gets socked in the gut by the two-headed young woman, he nearly sobs. 

“He should’ve adopted _ us, _ but you were the one to survive. You useless piece of shit,” the ugly head says. “I like your hair,” the beautiful head says. 

They’re like a visualization of a bipolar disorder. Klaus manages to say a meek _ thanks _ before he gets thrown to the wall by someone invisible, this is another power that didn’t find home in the mansion. He gets up and takes a fighting stance to protect himself from the army of ghosts; the infants are crying with their eyes glowing red, and there’s an Exorcist-style preteen girl with her head twisted backwards crawling up the ceiling.

“I wanted to be a hero,” she hisses out.

“Well go ahead then,” Klaus pants. They’re getting on his frayed nerves. They’re just the ghosts and he is a human Ouija board, so he shouldn’t be surprised.

Klaus wades through the crowd while they keep bawling, their gnarled fingernails cling to his clothes and his hair. This is a never-ending freakshow so when Klaus sees a slight sparkle on his left he doesn’t believe it.

“Ben?” he whispers.

A ghostly guy next to Ben has stretchy, rubber-like limbs. 

“Ben, open the door!” Klaus is restrained by the phantoms on his left and right, pinning his arms behind his back until they crack. “Help me, please!”

His only goal is to get out since the fear swallows him whole; there’s one more figure in the corner that disappears as soon as Klaus blinks.

“Klaus, I’m— shit, never thought I’ll be saying this, but this is my fault, because I left you there sober…”

“We don’t have time for all this touching sibling bonding, mein bruder!”

Ben is still stuck.

_ “Join us, Klaus!” _

_ “This is not the life, remember all the abuse?” _

_ “Stay here with us.” _

_ “Poison yourself.” _

“Unleash the damn Horror already, Ben!” 

Klaus tastes copper on his tongue. The ghosts loosen the grip on him, and he hits his head against the corner of the tombstone. Blood feeds the cracks in the concrete, the ghost of the girl sleeping there opens its eyes. She never liked him since he was a teen. 

“Still a crybaby, Klaus,” she teases, little evil. 

Klaus stumbles away from her.

“No, not anymore.”

He might freeze to death here. 

He falls to his knees as soon as the rumbling turns to a thunderstorm. He’s gonna end up in the nuthouse if he survives or — which is even worse — in the rehab again, because he’s planning to get impossibly high once it’s all over. 

“Klaus, focus! Get down!” Ben roars as the blue explosion kills the darkness. 

The right side of Klaus head is all wet and sticky, and his ribs hurt with each shallow inhale. 

And the monster rips itself out of the portal in Ben’s stomach, along with utterly devilish noises the other creatures make. Klaus is lying on the floor pressed down by exhaustion and vertigo as the octopus’ tentacles swish around the mausoleum, wiping the ghosts off their way. Neon flares are foggy, there’s the shimmering light coming through the gaps in the door. When Klaus blinks again, Ben is the only ghost within eyeshot, but he can still feel somebody else’s presence. 

“Get up,” Ben is out of breath. “This took too much of your energy.” 

Sure, he’s just an odd Number Four, a weak addict — 

“Stop pitying yourself, Klaus. We need to get your ass out of here.” 

Ben can apparently read his minds.

Klaus nods and blacks out as soon as he tries to get up; he vaguely feels a pair of muscular arms under his armpits, but it doesn’t make any sense.

Not anymore. 

***

He’s sprawled across the grass, and the ray of sun makes him frown and turn his head to the side. Everything is too quiet just like that one time when he met God. 

“Hey, he’s waking up!”

“How could he still keep us there while unconscious?”

“I wonder.”

“Well, it’s Klaus.”

These words are said with love, and Klaus’ heart clenches painfully; he opens his eyes and sits up far too quickly. 

“Hey, hey, no more sudden moves.” 

A gentle hand on his shoulder pushes him back down; this is when Klaus finally finds the guts to admit that he’s. Still. Alive. 

“We need to work on this whole “make an angry ghost corporeal” thing,” Ben says with a crooked grin. “I thought you died, bro.”

They could’ve been an eccentric ghost duo pissing off the rest of the Hargreeves. 

Klaus identifies his other savior, he’s about to drown in a whirlpool of his emotions — he’s lying relaxed and ungracious with his head in _ Dave’s _ lap. Dave looks the same, just like Klaus remembers him from when they soldiered together; there’s no gunshot wounds in his chest either, his beautiful body deserves to remain intact in the afterlife, at least. 

The mausoleum is just a pile of lifeless stones a few feet away from them.

Klaus sniffles and asks,

“How?” 

And Dave says,

“You’ve always been strong.”

Klaus can’t take it seriously anymore, so he just stares at Dave and laughs raucously, on the brink of weeping while Dave keeps caressing his bruised jaw. 

“Holy shit, I did it. I conjured you, and… You’ve just,” Klaus hiccups and continues to giggle. “Met the deadliest part of my family, the best part, to be honest. Ben, this is Dave, the love of my life and death. Dave, this is… Ben.” 

“We had a chance to introduce ourselves while you were out,” Dave says politely. 

In the daylight, these blue aureoles around them are almost unnoticeable, both Dave and Ben look so _ alive, _ so _ real. _Dave’s touches are feather-light against the cut on Klaus’ head, but the pounding returns; he really needs to get himself checked for a concussion. 

Dave tucks a loose strand behind Klaus’ ear.

“You’ve got a few gray hairs on your temple. Looks great, by the way.”

“Oh, um, yes,” Klaus stutters out. “Getting old is no fun. Being scared shitless isn’t either.”

He’s more than just sure he didn’t have any gray hairs this morning. 

Ben doesn’t evaporate until the end of their chatting; Klaus is gonna have to need his and Dave’s support to get back to the mansion.

And finally make Dave meet the _ living _ part of his family if he’s lucky enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> well posting this bc rob replied to me on twitter. twice. best thing happened to me in this fandom so far ssjdjwkdy  
\---  
*thanks to those who commented THIS on [my post](https://i-seeaspaceshipinthe-sky.tumblr.com/post/187068945821/one-of-my-favorite-things-about-the-umbrella)


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